Finding the Other Way

Liberal Member of Parliament for the Isle of Anglesey (1929-1951) and Deputy Leader of the British Liberal Party (1949-1951), Megan Lloyd George states how her generation, which grew up during WWI, has never known true peace, and describes her belief that one's perspective will never be quite accurate with a spiritual component.

And now, This I Believe, the living philosophies of thoughtful men and women, presented in the hope they may strengthen your beliefs so that your life may be richer, fuller, happier. Here is Edward R. Murrow.

This I Believe. Lady Megan Lloyd George is one of the foremost women in British public life. She grew up at 10 Downing Street, where her father lived as Prime Minister. When she was 17, she accompanied her father to the Versailles Peace Conference, and from then on, she acted as his political secretary. In 1929, she was elected Liberal Member of Parliament for the Isle of Anglesey and continuously held that seat until 1951. She is one of the leading personalities in the British Liberal Party and became its Deputy Leader from 1949-1951. Here now is the creed of Lady Megan Lloyd George.

My generation was brought up in the First World War. We've never known peace, only wars and rumors of war. We’ve always lived at the foot of a volcano wondering when the next eruption would come and whether it would overwhelm us and our civilization. That fear has conditioned, perhaps unconsciously, our living and our thinking. So it isn’t surprising if, every now and then, a trapped sense of hopelessness comes over us, a feeling that there is no escape. Is there a way out?

I shall never forget the words of a French General in the First World War. Dreary trench warfare had been dragging on interminably and inconclusively. Our troops one day retreating a little; the next, gaining a few yards of ground with grim

toll of life and limb. There seemed no end to the deadlock. And someone said to the General, “What would Napoleon have done if he had been here?” And the reply was, “Ah, he would have found the other way.”

I believe that the other way is not to be found through science or material power or the application of political principles alone, but in seeing things in a different dimension. I believe that we must have new spiritual lenses if we are to get our perspective right, and think constructively. I often remember God’s question to patient, long-suffering Job: “Where is the way where light dwelleth?” And of the answer our Lord came to the earth to give: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

One of the difficulties of living in a time of crises and cataclysmic events is that one is dangerously apt to fold one’s hands and say, What can I do about it? This is a job for the superman, the statesman, the scientist, the social worker. In short, not my responsibility but the other chap’s, whoever he may be. How can I be expected to arrest these primeval forces let loose amongst us? With poverty and suffering on so vast a scale in the world, the little I can do to relieve it is hardly worth doing.

Even so, might the members of the early church—so small in numbers, so valiant of heart, setting out to convert a heathen world—have said. But they didn’t. They were sustained by the faith that moves mountains. Now I believe in the same way, there

is nothing beyond the power of man today if he be possessed of such spiritual dynamics.

I’m not a fatalist. When man was given a free will, he was also given the power to impede or accelerate the divine plan. I don’t believe, for instance, in our time that the forces of Nazism or Fascism would ultimately have drowned. But I do believe that the self-sacrifice and heroism of young men in Britain, in America, and in all free countries, hastened the day of victory.

That was Lady Megan Lloyd George, the leading Welsh woman in British public life, whose political career might best be described by the word "independence."